Silent Retreats Read online

  "Sorry," the priest said. "Not very attractive, a man of the cloth bearing arms. Some joker robbed us last month—got the Bishop's Relief Fund collection. Scared hell out of the Monsignor."

  "I'm serious," Martin said. "You gonna blow somebody out of his socks right on your front porch?"

  "Yeah, I know—I probably won't shoot anybody."

  "Don't you guys carry insurance for the Bishop's collection or whatever?" Martin rubbed his face. The beard was back. "You know, you might consider a dog. Experience tells me you can keep the poor from crowding in on you if you simply buy a large, well-trained killer dog." Martin's head was buzzing. "I think if I kept a .38 around I'd be afraid I'd use it on myself, and I'm not even celibate on purpose. I would never use a killer dog on myself, no matter how loathsome things got."

  "You have a number of interesting points there," the priest said. "How about some coffee?"

  "Is the gun loaded?"

  "Hey—touché on the gun, okay? I'm sorry I met you at the door with a gun."

  "No, no, don't apologize," Martin said. "Black and no sugar. I'll just sit here a while. Semi-upright. On this couch."

  "That would be fine," the priest said. He headed for the kitchen. Martin stared at the picture of Christ on the wall. It was an ordinary picture of a man, only Martin knew it was Christ because of how the guy was holding his hands. When had they stopped painting halos so you knew who was holy?

  The priest was back with a huge mug of coffee and two aspirin. "For the hangover," he said. "I don't know your name still. I'm Thomas Simon." He seemed to have a regular chair, and he relaxed in it and let Martin sip at the scalding coffee. The floors of the whole house were bare gleaming hardwood, dark. The warm glow of the low light bent down on them and made the hour seem very late. The priest watched him, and Martin was aware he was watching. Martin had a flash of the woman that morning, leaning over toward him, shouting through the window that she'd help. He tried to think about her. Stopping, that was a nice thing she did. Then she was completely gone. He wanted to run an ad in the paper that might find her. What would the ad say?

  "You don't have to tell me your name if you don't want to," the priest said.

  "Are we gonna start sharing now?" Martin replied. The furniture was spare, the floor dark and clean, the lights dimmer and dimmer, and the house was completely still.

  Fiona's Rooms

  Skidmore had a woman named Fiona, a strange woman who looked like she hated everything because of how she painted her eyes. There's a picture of Yank and Fiona, before Yank left, taken at a farmhouse south of Long Pine in 1980. Yank is toasting the camera with a silver can of malt liquor, and he's trying to smile but he can't quite pull it off. His beard is shaved crooked, and, to hold back his long hippie hair, he's wearing the elastic waistband from his jockey shorts around his head. Fiona is standing straight, even under the weight of Yank's left arm, which she seems to have shouldered in order to hold him up. There is a blur through Fiona's face, like a question she didn't know she had. The picture was taken on the front porch of the farmhouse, and far off in the distance behind them is the road sign pointing toward the strange little ravine town of Long Pine, located a mile and a half south of the hardroad. The sign is really a painting of a pine tree, tall and narrow and slanting off at an angle—quasi-Indian art. It looks phallic, or like a giant green corndog waiting to be launched.

  Yank served in Vietnam, and he had a great stereo to show for it. It was Yank who actually selected the dreary three rooms above a bar in downtown Fort Robinson, this after they'd hurriedly abandoned the Long Pine farm when things suddenly went bad and Yank couldn't swing his end of the rent. They'd lived in Long Pine five months, and had hoped to stay there through the harvest, Yank working at the elevator, Fiona singing in The Gulley and cooking at the hotel. But there'd been a fight of some kind—Fiona would never know all there was to know about Yank—and someone was cut with a razor, and there'd been some bad money exchanged for something, Fiona wasn't sure what. Anyway, it had suddenly come to Yank that it was time to leave. They had wearily slouched into Fort Robinson in the middle of a July night, courtesy of a lonesome trucker hauling used cars to Cheyenne. Yank carried the stereo, and Fiona carried the clothes and her banged-up guitar. It was a new beginning.

  Yank painted the apartment a uniform glossy white. He built a great platform bed in the bedroom, which faced west and caught a full blast of summer sun beginning in the middle of each afternoon. And when all this work was done, he settled in for the long haul, went out looking for a job. He had his rich brown hippie hair cut at an actual barbershop for the first time since the army, to show he was serious. Using a little of the money Fiona's ex-husband was then sending along to help her out, he bought a new pair of wheat-colored Levi's and a fancy shirt; and, as always, he made friends with the local cowboys, joining them in the mornings for red beer in the bar down below the apartment. Fiona noticed that he seemed real happy, and for about six days it looked like he was completely stabilized. Then one afternoon the stereo turned up missing and Fiona found out he had traded an Indian even for a Yamaha 750 and hit the road without notice. She ceremoniously hung the Long Pine farmhouse picture on the glossy white wall over the platform bed.

  That was in 1980. Yank had been a fine lover, but Fiona seemed to understand his departure, and she liked to think that she could do very well alone. In 1979 she'd hitchhiked penniless out of Valdosta following her divorce. She claimed to be a singer and a writer, and she'd told her ex-husband that when she got out west she was going to write something great. He sent checks to provide a base for her to do just that. From the Long Pine farm, she'd sent a story or two to show him she was "producing," and the boys at The Gulley took a picture of her singing on the barroom stage so she could send that, too. There was never a sign from her husband that he'd received these items, but he kept sending along money and Fiona figured that must mean something. Yank had really liked Fiona's singing, but he didn't give a damn what she was writing, or how she wrote. He was, however, real impressed that she was smart enough to be a writer and still liked him. He raved and raved when she bought an old Olympia portable typewriter and he saw how fast she could go on it.

  Yank gave Fiona quite a lot to write about. She set her type writer on a stocky library table that miraculously was furnished with the place. She moved the table under the tall windows in the bedroom so that sometimes she could look up and stare out over the alley, out over the town, westward out toward the Pine Ridge, and think about Yank, what he must be doing, what he had done, how he used to touch her, and what he had said. Grist for the mill, she thought to herself. Good material, she thought, and she put it all down. Next to her table on the right was the radiator. On the left was her stack of stories and a couple of novels, written before this her "blue cowgirl period," as she called it. Beneath the big bed was her journal, in which each evening she wrote about her life, following intricate directions given to her by her niece, who had once taken a course in creative writing.

  Skidmore was a lawyer in Fort Robinson, and before he had Fiona, he was a depressed person because he had just come through a time when he had a woman named Jolinda, a strong Dakota Sioux woman who was forty-eight years old and lived in a concrete-block house out on the reservation. Jolinda loved Skidmore very much, and she was quite a novelty to him, too. Skidmore had loved Chinese women and a black lady from the southside of Chicago, and he'd loved a wicked German fraülein he traveled with on a Eurail pass back in '71, and he'd loved a redheaded professional women's basketball player from Chattanooga, and he had loved a short blond law student from the University of Louisville when he was studying there—a fancy girl whom he still often dreamed of. But most of all, Skidmore loved the girth of his experience, and the time came when the Indian experiment got old, the long drive out to the reservation became bleak, and Jolinda's requirements crowded him. Soon after that, he didn't go out there much anymore. He didn't say anything to Jolinda about his fading sentiments. He s
imply withdrew. He hoped in time she would be able to fill the void with some glorious offspring of Crazy Horse, some ambitious and brave grandson of Red Cloud, some full-blooded descendant of great warriors, if such had survived.

  It was, in fact, on the one hundred and fourth anniversary of the bayoneting of Crazy Horse on the streets of Fort Robinson (the fort, not the nearby town named after the fort) that Jolinda ingested the rough equivalent of her weight in Pine-Sol. That night Skidmore sat by his phone, as though someone would call or he would call someone, while they worked hard over Jolinda in the emergency room. The terror and guilt made his ears ring—the panic caused his blood to rush so hard that small capillaries broke in the whites of his eyes and his mouth dried out. He sat in the dark of his office, which was also his home, which was also a trailer in the Pine Ridge–Fort Robinson trailer court. Through the walls of the trailer, Skidmore could hear his clients—drunken Indian braves squawking their tires at the A&W down on the highway, Chevy loads of high school girls laughing dark and loud at the stoplight nearby. The tension crushed in on him, and sitting there in the dark, Skidmore devised a method for killing himself if word came that Jolinda had died. He decided to shoot himself up on the Pine Ridge, where no one would find him and his remains would simply become prairie powder. Or he would find an anonymous pine, in among thousands of others in a forest, and he would hang himself in the top of it, his body concealed in a plastic Glad bag to foil the buzzards and the magpies and to blunt the shock to any poor backpacker who might come upon the scene. He would go away to the wilderness alone and take his own wretched life, in reparation for what he had done to Jolinda that caused her to drink a toxic substance because of her all-consuming love for him. Anyway, word came in the night that Jolinda had lived and Skidmore let himself off the hook. But he never went to her again, and he always worried that he would encounter her along the dusty Fort Robinson streets. He watched for her so as to duck into a store if she should come by.

  Skidmore's office was the South Ridge Legal Services Organization, law for the poor, and he had a secretary named Peg who arrived at the trailer each morning at nine. As Skidmore's law practice faltered onward, Peg said nothing, but did her duty at the typewriter and the filing cabinet. Skidmore often wondered what Peg thought of him as she observed his wasted movement and his confused ways. He was constantly distracted by his aching guilt over Jolinda, and he knew it showed. Three times a week, in jeans and blue jogging shoes, coat and tie, he walked up the hill from the trailer court to the old courthouse where he shouted and groaned and objected client after client directly into jail. The judges hated him because he often resorted to loud talk instead of strong argument, and they were not receptive to his continuous charges of racism. They would hold against him on principle. The district attorney and other prosecutors didn't even know Skidmore was in the courtroom, and easily cut through his half-baked, knee-jerk liberal, laughably ineffectual arguments. Skidmore was losing heart, finally. He was feeling too old to be a social worker, no longer able to tolerate and rationalize the self-destruction poor people seemed to bring on themselves, or so he saw it. There were three shootings and two stabbings a year in his trailer court alone.

  And Fiona didn't really hate everything, despite the dark pitiless stare she drew over her eyes. She'd learned that from the rock stars. The fact was, she was wide open to the world. The severe eye makeup was probably a lucky thing, keeping the whole world from gravitating in upon her and delaying the continuous typing of novels and stories that was proceeding in the rooms above the downtown bar. After Yank's departure, Fiona found that she could feed herself and live, although sparsely, on the monthly check from Valdosta, and her productivity soared. On Tuesdays, as a matter of organization, she fixed her plumbing or went to the laundromat, and in the afternoon, by long-established and hard-to-break habit, she might play her guitar and sing—quietly, so that the sound didn't go through the floor and draw a bunch of curious and drunken cowboys. Or she would bake some bread—a week's worth—anything to get away from the typewriter. A day of rest, it was something else her niece had learned in the writing class, and Fiona stuck by it to the letter. She hated filth, and despite its whiteness, because the apartment was old and dusty, she cleaned it obsessively, down on her hands and knees, humming country tunes and thinking about all her stories.

  In all this, Fiona rarely said anything to anyone in Fort Robinson, and Fort Robinson, if it ever really knew she had come to town, gradually forgot. Except for the cowboys down stairs, who sort of knew Fiona through the cowboy talk Yank had engaged in when he was down there mornings trying to make friends. From time to time, as a result of that talk, Fiona would have to endure the curious advances of drunks when she was returning from the park or a trip to the laundromat. She was a puzzle to the cowboys because she was obviously a street woman but never seemed to come out and play. Sometimes they would wait for her at the bar's side door, located right on the slanting stairs she had to climb to her rooms. She learned to go by them quickly, and usually one among them would moderate the others and there wouldn't be any violence. But one day when she was returning from the laundromat, Fiona encountered a lone drunk high on the stairs in the shadows, near the door to the apartment. He came at her, knocked her down the stairs, laundry and all, and awkwardly crashed down the stairs after her. He seemed hell bent on having her right on the downtown sidewalk. But Fiona, ever since her hitchhiking days, had carried a five-inch Buck hunting blade concealed in her boot. She pulled it on this drunk, and she put it against his chest, just below his hairy old throat, and she backed him into the bar. She backed him across the bar, backed him into the men's room, right up against the locked door of the only stall in the place where he couldn't back up any farther. The sheriff was on the pot, unfortunately. He overheard Fiona, in a low voice, tell her would-be assailant that she would have cut his balls off if they'd been in there alone, but she could see boots under the stall door. She didn't know the boots belonged to the sheriff. When he was finished he flushed the toilet and went upstairs and arrested her. He explained that his brother was her landlord and also the owner of the bar downstairs, and that neither of them, he nor his brother, would stand by while trash like Fiona degraded the premises, and this business of pulling knives on the clientele would have to stop also.

  Which is how she met Skidmore, public defender. On the merits of Skidmore's professional legal counsel, she was convicted and fined, and, unable to pay the fine, spent a week in the Dawes County jail in Chadron. These events gave Fiona, who was accustomed to the desperate life, material for yet another novel and she didn't even hate Skidmore for his incompetence. In fact, they became friends, and he got her apartment back for her by collecting on an old debt. Skidmore had once helped the sheriff's brother sidestep a paternity suit.

  That autumn Skidmore found his way to Fiona's rooms on many afternoons. He would climb the slanting staircase and knock—they developed a little code, two taps, then three taps, so she would know it was him and not the sleaze from downstairs back to settle the score. She did worry about that.

  Sometimes when he arrived, Skidmore would be depressed, and sometimes he would be angry or cranky, because of what he was going through over at the courthouse. Because Fiona had no phone, her place was truly shelter, and Skidmore liked to go there because her rooms were so clean and fragrant and she never yelled at him, and her bed was always crisp and white, and her love was a new adventure. In the afternoon, they could lie in the sun that came through the tall windows, and together they could stare off into the far distance at the tan-colored fields of cut wheat, the pine-rimmed bluffs, the whole vast land. Through the open windows, the autumn air would come into the room, hot but at least moving, and spread flat across Fiona's writing table and the big bed Yank built before he went away.

  Fiona knew Skidmore, too, was just passing through. Long ago she'd stopped counting on men or expecting much from them. She never said a lot to him about the past or future. She wrote in her j
ournal that the two of them were like two separate small orbiting particles—their coming together was a random thing. But Skidmore wanted to claim her, in some way to get her to love him and him alone and with great devotion. He asked her to move to the trailer—even promised to get rid of Peg—but Fiona made excuses. She said she liked her writing table. She said she hated trailers. She said for all she knew Yank was just on a trip with his new motorcycle and would be back within a couple of years. They both laughed, and Skidmore started paying the rent to the sheriff's brother. He never told Fiona about the Dakota Sioux woman and the Pine-Sol, but sometimes Fiona saw panic and desperation in Skidmore's eyes, aloneness and futility, distraction. Sometimes he was rough, and his humor was hard and grim. He seemed to take more than he gave, and sadly.

  She wrote in her journal: "Sometimes I sense that we are only moments from one of those confessions or surrenders that are suddenly blurted out and change people's lives." She would watch him closely, wondering what was on his mind.

  Skidmore called Fiona his "blue cowgirl," because she had confided in him that she got the idea to leave Valdosta from the book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which she was reading the very day her divorce finally came through. In her own mind and probably in reality, the "blue cowgirl" phase had ended with Yank and the move from the Long Pine farm house. Having put that period behind her, she no longer appreciated allusions to it. She was now seeking "liberation," and liberation was the subject of her writing, liberation from her own past and from the traditional limitations of traditional womanhood, but liberation even beyond those things—liberation generally, the elusive freedom suggested by the very ring of the word. That was the current phase for Fiona.

  She was subscribing to literary magazines and Harper's and Atlantic, and it seemed like every single story had a woman in it who started lifting weights. Fiona couldn't afford weights, but she started toning up, doing exercises every day. She read in Time that fitness was what was happening for today's woman—that's what Time referred to them as, today's woman—and so Fiona did daily exercises, jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups, stretching exercises. She practiced kung-fu moves she found in a Cosmopolitan she'd borrowed from the laundromat. She took up nothing that demanded the purchase of special shoes, special support, or special designer sweat clothes.